My mother had me when she was twenty. Twenty was young to be married and pregnant, even in that day and age. And in that day and age, the older, less progressive doctors removed fathers from the delivery so my mother was alone. Alone in a sterile room with an officious nurse and a doctor who treated my mother like a child. Like a child, my mother did what she was told. She was told to lie back. She was told to count backward from ten while she was anesthetized. Anesthetized, my mother couldn’t push, so the doctor and nurse did it for her. Her body was manipulated, forced into positions, her belly pressed upon by a stranger, until, while she was still unconscious, I was pulled from her with forceps and cut and cleaned and whisked to the nursery. The nursery was where my father, who had been drinking in the bar across the street with my grandfather, first saw me, his first child. His first child, when I was finally handed to my mother the next day, was furred head to toe with a delicate red down. “You know,” my father said, jovially, “she looks just like a monkey!”“Like a monkey?” said my mother. My mother, who was bruised from her breasts to her thighs by the hands of a nurse and that doctor; my mother, who didn’t remember my birth other than the cold operating room and counting backward and waking up alone in recovery, recovered enough to look at me, a girl, and begin to cry. ​

Katherine Hubbard holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University and teaches both academic writing and creative writing in Philadelphia. She has published stories in VCU Blackbird Literary Journal, Sanskrit Literary Arts Journal, Yellow Chair Review, Front Porch Journal, The Dos Passos Review, Penmen Review, Seventeen, and other journals. She writes about her two favorite pastimes, writing and reading, here: thisthingneedsatitle.blogspot.com